25 years and one day ago, on November 2, 1988 at 8 a.m. US time, the US Department of Defense thought the Russians had launched an attack. The first computer to start behaving strangely was at MIT. Within hours, a virus had spread and infected 10% of all the computers in the world. About 6,000 computers crashed. It was this virus that shaped the internet as we know it today.
What infected the then-few computers wasn't malware. It was just bad code. You see, Robert Morris, a student at Cornell, wrote a program and accidentally created a worm that replicated itself, multiplying so many times that it overwhelmed servers and, by extension, crashed them.
The problem wasn't serious. As we said, it wasn't malware . It did, however, create a terrible fear among computer users, and since then, we've reached the point where we are now, with viruses and antiviruses having spelled the end of the innocence of the internet.
Now watch an amazing video from a television report on the event and people's reactions at the time:
Source: digitallife.gr
